Ten lessons for a post-pandemic world

The Omicron variant marks the beginning of a post-pandemic world, an American journalist says.

Fareed Zakaria, one of the world's most respected journalists, predicted Covid-19 might fundamentally change our relationships to work and technology.

The host of GPS for CNN worldwide and columnist for The Washington Post, recently stepped back to take a wider view of what the world would be like, as a result of Covid-19. From this comes his new book- 10 Lessons for a Post Pandemic World.

The Omicron variant marks the beginning of a post pandemic world as we witness Covid becoming endemic, he told Jesse Mulligan.

“The principal feature of Omicron is that it is giving antibodies to the unvaccinated. They're getting it the hard way, by getting infected, for some of them it's serious, mostly it's mild.

“But the most important feature of this is that it is spreading so widely, so fast that everyone, lots and lots of people, are getting it. But the number of people who are getting it who are unvaccinated is something like 10 to 15 times as many as the vaccinated.”

This means the unvaccinated are getting anti-bodies, he says.  

“In places like the United States, where shamefully we have only 62 to 63 percent vaccinated, people who are unvaccinated are getting it at a pace that they are now getting antibodies themselves to defend against future infections.

“But far more importantly, it is spreading across Asia, it is spreading across Africa, it is spreading in countries where there hasn't been access to the vaccine.

“And in those places, you are seeing the numbers go up, as in South Africa, but then sharply down. Because again, so much infection is leading to so many people having natural immunities.”

The way various societies have responded to Covid has been instructive, he says.

“We've had one of the world's great political science experiments conducted over the last two years.”

The broad lesson, he says, is countries that don't do government well have fared badly.

I don't mean by that big or small government, it's not the quantity of government. It's the quality of government.”

Taiwan is a shining example of doing a lot with a little, he says.

“Taiwan spends less on health care than, as a percentage of GDP, any of the countries we can imagine it's something like under 5 percent of GDP. America's close to 20 percent of GDP, most of Europe is 12 to 15 percent of GDP.”

But Taiwan has a well-designed, well-functioning public health care system, Zakaria says.

They have had astonishing results on with Covid. They are right next to China, all kinds of travel between them and China and yet an island of 22 million people, the number of Covid deaths are in the hundreds.

“To give you a comparison, New York State is about 19 million people and the death rate from Covid is well over 50,000.”

To succeed a society must also believe in collective response. Even societies in Europe with good public institutions such as France and Germany eventually started to chafe against restrictions, he says.

“Asian societies; Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, are much more collective minded, much more willing to engage in a kind of collective group effort to handle this.”

He believes New Zealand is a blend of the two cultures.

“It combines the best elements of West and East because New Zealand has a well-functioning public bureaucracy, in every pretty much every area, but particularly in public health.

“And secondly, you have a willingness to engage in kind of public collective action.”

If we were to give out prizes, East Asia would win, he says.

“Taiwan probably gets the gold medal. But all of the countries in Asia, in here I would include Australia and New Zealand, it's so much better than the than the Western world.

“And the UK and the US basically ended up doing worse, particularly given the best research hospitals in the world, the Mayo Clinic, all that stuff is all in the US.

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“And yet the United States is going to have a million people who will have died to Covid.”

Covid-19 demonstrated that the US does not have a public health system, Zakaria says.

“We have a private health system, we have a system that if you're rich, if you're employed, if you have a good insurance policy, through your employer, which is what most Americans have, you’re fine … but it's all about you.

“The institutions of public health that are about providing public services like mass testing, mass contact tracing, isolation, data gathering, warning, all those things require collective actions - the United States is very bad at that.”

The flip side of that individualistic culture is the inventiveness and entrepreneurialism that gave the world vaccines so quickly, he says.

“It is worth pointing out that the single most dramatic positive development in this pandemic has been the extraordinary rapid and effective arrival of vaccines, and also treatments.

And most of these, not all, but most of this came out of America's entrepreneurial culture, the collaboration between private businesses and the public sector.”

Perhaps the biggest change brought by the pandemic has been our relationship with work, he says.

“We have come to realise that the model of work we had, which was essentially going to an office five days a week, nine to five, was basically a kind of 19th century white-collar version of the factory.”

We need to go to the office not to work, but when we need to work together, he says.

“What the pandemic has made us realise is we actually are living in a completely digital world in which you can work from anywhere in most jobs, not all, but there's about 50 percent of the jobs in the world in which you can work from anywhere.”